We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
Contemporary research on information structure addresses two main topics: the content of information structure, and the development of models of grammar which account for interactions among information structure, syntax, and semantics. This chapter briefly deals with the first topic. It is not our goal here to evaluate theories of information structure in detail (for thorough overviews, see Vallduví 1992 and Erteschik-Shir 2007). Instead, we offer some observations on how information-structure roles are defined in what we consider to be the most articulated and coherent views of information structure. The literature on information structure contains a plethora of terms that overlap but are used in different and conflicting ways, and so one of our main aims is to provide explicit working definitions and terms for the concepts which we will assume, which can be used in further analysis. The second question, the place of information structure in our theory of grammar, will be addressed in Chapter 4.
The content of information structure
We view exchange of information as the main function of language. Information structure is the level of sentence organisation which represents how the speaker structures the utterance in context in order to facilitate information exchange. Specifically, it indicates how the propositional content of an utterance fits the addressee's perceived state of knowledge at the time of utterance. In human communication, new information is normally added to the already existing store of knowledge in the addressee's mind.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
